The Spanish Grand Prix was never going to be that exciting, because the Catalunya track is an F1 aerodynamicist’s dream, with lots of high-speed sweepers. That makes it a nightmare for anyone who wants to overtake because high-speed sweepers generate a lot of aerodynamic wake, which makes it difficult for a car to closely follow another one, while the only long straight has at its end a fast corner. The braking area is just too short to get much done, even if you’re behind the wheel of a McLaren that’s a rocket ship in a straight line and you have a much slower Mercedes ahead of you. Of course, having one M. Schumacher, the man who perfected blocking into an art form, in the Mercedes made Jenson Button’s task even more difficult.

In the first four races of the season, Schuey wasn’t mixing it much with the McLarens and Ferraris, although his younger teammate, Nico Rosberg, was. There were all sorts of excuses coming out, such as the Merc understeering too much for Schuey’s taste, even that the chassis he was driving had a flaw. Mercedes team members admitted that the car wasn’t to the seven-time champion’s liking, although cynical observers hadn’t failed to notice that Rosberg was doing a rather better job with said car.

Well, now Mercedes has altered the weight distribution (by lengthening the wheelbase) to make the car more tail-happy, a handling tendency that Schuey loves but that few of his teammates have ever enjoyed. Moreover, Mercedes says that it couldn’t fix some damage sustained to his car in one of the earlier races, so he switched to a different chassis for Spain. As a result, Schuey both outqualified and outraced his teammate for the first time this year, even though he was still some ways off the pace of the Red Bulls and the lead Ferrari and McLaren.

Rosberg, on the other hand, wasn’t such a happy chap, having been quoted as saying that he found the revised car difficult to drive and that he couldn’t get it set up the way he liked. Which is what plenty of Schumacher’s teammates have said in the past when a car was tailored to his driving style rather than theirs . . . We’ll see how this one plays out, but one wonders whether the close relationship between team principal Ross Brawn and Schuey will end up alienating Rosberg if car development is centered around the older German’s whims.